The Chicken Or The Egg Argument Essay

Egg or Chicken Who Came First The classic Question and Favorite topic for any Essay GD test. The huge question of the chicken and the egg was a major riddle to Roman philosophers, and their incapability to answer it started from a misconception about the world. In the recent world we understand enough to provide a rock-solid answer, the only issue is, you could reason with a justification for both results.

The evolutionist has a different story to tell, however. To them, chickens evolved from other species of birds, but which ones remains unclear. They weren’t flightless birds which gave rise to chickens, because they are thought to have evolved from birds which could fly but lost that capability through mutation.

The Creator placed designs for large amount of diversity within the genetics of the original kinds. As this diversity was passed from parent to children, most likely a non-chicken bird eventually laid an egg containing a chicken. So, technically, it’s very likely that the chicken egg came first, according to the research.

Eggs have been existing since fish evolved, long before birds generally and chickens specifically. Eventually, a bird which has a lot of similarities to a chicken laid an egg, and a chicken hatched out of it. There might be some arguments here and there over exactly where in the evolutionary line is the division between “chicken” and “not-chicken” but no matter how you comprehend it, the egg was there before anything else.

It’s trendy today to claim that birds evolved from dinosaurs, although, there is little agreement on which dinosaur lineage was ancestral to birds. The claim is still prevalent in spite of the reason that birds and dinosaurs differ in all ways. Legs might have become wings and scales might have become feathers. Dinosaurs apparently had solid bones but bird bones are hollow. Reptilian dinosaurs were likely cold blooded while birds are warm blooded with an extremely high metabolism. Dinosaurs are known to have lungs similar to mammals, while the bird’s breathing scheme is totally different. At least dinosaur eggs were similar to bird’s eggs internally. Externally, they had a soft, hard shell very different from bird’s eggs.

You might be able to tell that the chicken really does come before the egg. According to researchers at Warwick and Sheffield universities, chicken eggs depends on a specific protein found in chicken ovaries to hatch. Technically, that means that any individual chicken egg we come across today had to have been through a chicken at some point. So in that way if we consider the chicken was first. But if we’re talking about the concept of chicken eggs in general, we feel like the egg is the clear winner according to research and science.

PLEASE NOTE THIS SITE IS RETIRED. THE CURRENT SITE IS HumanistContemplative.org

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Chicken Or The Egg?

The following was a rather silly exchange between myself and my friend Nathan back in October of 2002 on the age-old question of "which came first, the chicken or the egg?"...

Nathan:

There are two main schools of thought on this subject.

The first is a Platonic argument based on philosophical constructs. The chicken is an actual chicken, while the egg is a potential chicken. Since actuality ALWAYS proceeds potentiality, we can deduce that the chicken MUST have come first.

I, however, subscribe to the second school of thought that is based on evolutionary biology. Since mutation and genetic drift occur in offspring, then that means that there was some cycle in which a creature laid an egg that produced a slightly different creature. At some point, long ago, one of these creatures, that wasn’t quite a chicken, laid an egg that genetically varied from itself slightly. That slight variation pushed the new creature (that would eventually emerge from the egg) into what we now classify as a chicken.

Hence, the first chicken hatched from an egg that was laid by a creature that wasn’t quite a chicken.

i.e. – THE EGG CAME FIRST!

rebuttals are welcome. What do you think?

DT:

I’m sorry but you are mistaken. It can only be that the CHICKEN came before the egg, based on evolutionary evidence...

First, you have the possibility (even probability) that the proto-chicken life form was also an animal which laid eggs. Given the going hypothesis is that avians evolved from dinosaurs, which also laid eggs, then it may seem that the egg would have come long before the chicken.

However, we should be careful not to make a CONTEXTUAL logical error, in which the same word is used, but the definitions are different. In other words, when we ask, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, surely one is not asking if ANY sort of egg (insect, dinosaur, etc.) came before the chicken. The implication is that one is asking, “which came first, the chicken or the CHICKEN EGG?” If the old question refers specifically to a CHICKEN egg, then we must look to the definition of speciation.

Biologically, what determines whether or not something is a new species revolves around the question of whether or not it can produce viable offspring with the others in question. Let us suppose that two populations of proto-chicken find themselves suddenly isolated geographically. Their two genomes will begin to drift over time, based on the pressures of their two different environments. Let us call the two groups PC1 and PC2 (proto-chicken populations 1 and 2) and let us assume that PC1 will eventually evolve into the modern chicken, while PC2 becomes something else, perhaps a form of reptile or more likely a turkey. At some given point in time, the PC1 genome will drift so far from PC2 that a member from each would no longer be capable of the conception of viable offspring together.

Now, this would probably happen gradually, meaning that there would be several generations of PC1 and PC2 that CAN produce viable offspring, but only with much effort and with increasing frequent miscarriages and/or deformities. Nevertheless, at one point there would be a generation in which no pregnancy would occur, regardless of the number of times attempted. It would be this generation that will have officially become a unique species (in this case, the modern chicken). The very first member of this generation would have been the VERY first chicken.

Because all of his older siblings would have such abysmal failure rates in trying to breed with PC2, it would be nearly impossible to tell which individuals had a very low chance of offspring with PC2, and which were completely incompatible. However, common sense suggests that there MUST have been one particular individual which was first born, where the possibility of generating offspring with PC2 was zero. Despite our inability to have recognized the individual, this organism would have been a chicken, while its parent would not have been.

So now the issue comes down to, how do you define the “ownership” of the egg; by it’s occupant or by it’s lay-er? If the egg is considered to be a proto-chicken egg because the organism that laid it was a proto-chicken, then we must conclude that the CHICKEN came before the egg (chicken egg, that is). However, if we could say that the first chicken came from a chicken egg because it contained a chicken, then we must conclude that the EGG (chicken egg) came before the chicken, which would then hatch from THAT egg.

I would argue that the most rational definer of egg-ownership would be that organism which laid the egg. The reason being, that at the time the egg is formed, there is no chicken inside because it has yet to form (and what of eggs which are never fertilized?). Therefore, the owner of the egg is most consistently considered to be the parent. Furthermore, when we look at the human example of female eggs and what we already have defined as legal ownership, it is clear that the mother is the owner of her eggs. Therefore, as per the reasoning in the previous paragraph, one can only logically conclude that, because it gestated, NOT inside a chicken egg, but inside a proto-chicken egg, that THE CHICKEN CAME BEFORE THE EGG.